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February 28, 2004
YET ANOTHER CANDIDATE FOR IDIOT OF THE YEAR
Okay, expecting anything intelligent to come out of Houston Astros' second baseman Jeff Kent is probably overly optimistic - this is the guy that shattered his wrist a couple of years ago while popping wheelies on his motorcycle and tried to claim he'd done it while washing his truck. However, Kent has hit the idiocy jackpot this week... he responded to the growing steroid scandal in baseball by saying, in almost as many words, that we should all get over it because Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig might have used them too.
"Babe Ruth didn't do steroids?" Kent was quoted as saying. "How do you know? ... People are saying Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth -- how do you know those guys didn't do steroids? So all of a sudden, you've got guys doing steroids now in the 20th century, 21st century? Come on."
Well, Jeff... beyond the simple scientific fact that steroids weren't developed until the 1930s, and didn't begin getting used by athletes until the 1950s... and beyond the fact that both Ruth and Gehrig were done playing by 1939... thus making it pretty much physically impossible for either man to have done steroids... let's look at what you really just said. Well into the early 1960s, most baseball players were not paid enough money to make it through a year - many ballplayers had second jobs during the offseason in the towns that they played in. Baseball players didn't really start becoming overpaid prima donnas like you until the 1980s. The motivation to screw with their bodies - not to mention the money to gain access to advanced science like steroids - just wasn't there. Sure, Ruth and Gehrig were special cases, they technically could have gotten access to something, I suppose, even if steroids didn't exist back then. But do you mean to tell me that your response to the fact that at least 7% of modern baseball players are cheating - probably including some of the game's biggest stars - is simply to suggest that they could have cheated in the old days too? So two wrongs make a right? Jeff? Just shut up.
Oh, and on this topic... to Jason Giambi's utterly ridiculous contention that he looks thinnner this year because he gave up fast food... Hey, Jason? I eat a lot of fast food. Guess what? It doesn't make me look like a 'roided up musclehead like you looked last year. It makes me look fat. Not muscled up... just a big fast food belly. So if you're going to try and claim that you were beefed up last year because of too many In-and-Out burgers, I got news for ya. No one's buying that crock.
